An Outsider’s Inside View of the Global Services Industry: New Value Props, and Bots to Boot | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Just a month ago I rejoined Everest Group as its chief research guru. And while I thoroughly enjoyed my stints as chief research officer at Market Track (a competitive intelligence firm for advertisers) and The Hackett Group (an intellectual property-based strategic consultancy and benchmarking firm) over the last 10 years, I’m feeling like a kid in a candy store in today’s digitally-oriented global services industry!

Here are my gut reactions to visits I had last week with two sell-side organizations.

Wipro

Wow, wow, wow.

That’s research speak for how I felt after the inauguration of Wipro’s brand new Silicon Valley Innovation Center on August 1. The Center, which Wipro bills as, “…state-of-the-art R&D and incubation hub, designed to develop and showcase next-generation technologies and solutions for enterprises” clearly displayed how much its value proposition has changed.

It wasn’t that long ago that Wipro and its peers were promoting savings, quality, and scale, along with a thin layer of industry expertise. Now it’s showcasing innovative solutions along a broad array of concepts that include the future of retail, banking, and healthcare, to name just a few.

It’s clear Wipro knows that the robots are coming, rendering its traditional proposition passé, similar to what EDS, CSC, ACS, and HPE experienced over the past 15 or so years. So will its ideas be enough to compete in this dog-eat-digital global services environment? It’s hard to say, but it’s certainly going to give it the old college try. We’ll update our thoughts in due time.

Automation Anywhere

No C3POs to be found, but I did see some game changers.

I took advantage of my time in Silicon Valley to stop by Automation Anywhere’s headquarters. And I was sorely disappointed when they didn’t show me a warehouse full of R2D2 and C3PO robots. Instead, they showed me an evolutionary capability that has reached a tipping point that should make enterprise executives do an immediate rethink of how they design their organizations.

I had a spirited debate with CEO Mihir Shukla and his team about how Automation Anywhere’s RPA-based solution will impact enterprises. Our mutual thoughts were that some will use it incrementally to create short-term savings and process improvements, but that really innovative executives will use it as one of several key tools to change the competitive landscape in their markets. For them, it will be a thing of beauty. For others? Well, let’s be positive.

Watch this space for some really cool fact-based insights that help differentiate the winner and loser enterprises over the coming months.

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